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Tuesday, May 5, 2009

How To Include Advertisements In Your Blog Design Perfectly

by KabirBedi

Advertisements are a great source of revenue for any online presence. In fact, it is a great way to make money with blogs while you strengthen your online visibility simultaneously.

There are 2 common types of ads that appear in blogs - Google AdSense and Banner Advertisements. While banner advertisements generally have a size of 125 X 125, Google Adsense consist if a group of text accompanied by corresponding links. These advertisements can be placed in three areas of a web page - Sidebars, Within the Post or at the Bottom of the Post.

Advertisements on blogs act as a great revenue channel for the same. However, for it to really perform well and not interfere with the design, you need to implement them well and integrate it seamlessly within the design. If you just paste the ads across the blog without any second thought, it looks not just amateurish but also spoils the design on the whole. Not only this, blogs look distracting and it gets difficult for the visitors to use it. That is why it is important to carefully insert ads in the blog design so that it doesn't interfere with the design and yet fulfills the advertising purpose.

Here are some tips to do a good job with the advertisements on your blog.

Distinct the Ads from the Blog Content

One of the most important things that you should do is to make a clear distinction between the advertisements and the contents of the blog. This way, your readers would be able to locate the informative contents easily and identify the advertisements. This further enhances the navigation process and usability of the blog.

Always create a separate area for the ads and group all your advertisements within the area. Also, make sure to style the ad space differently from the rest of the blog so that readers can make an easy distinction. You can change the background color or mark the area with borders.

Mark the Ads as Advertisements

Its very important to mark the advertisements as 'Advertisement' because it gets easier for readers to identify the advertisements very quickly. This further decreases the chances that the readers will confuse the actual contents with the ads.

The sidebar ads seldom need labels. This is because the sidebar is already separate from the blog contents. However, there is no harm that can be done by marking them as ads. Advertisements that appear within the content of the blog should definitely be marked as ads. This facilitates easy recognition and demarcation of ads from the real content.

Focus on the Content

There should always be a balance between the various elements of the blog. The content of the blog should be given the highest priority while the advertisements and other elements should come only secondary. Don't let the ads seem as if they have more importance over actual content. Your readers would think that you don't value your content at all. Moreover, the ads can be too distracting that readers will not read through the whole content.

About the Author

KabirBedi is a senior web consultant with LeXolution IT Services, a premier web development company based in India. He leads a team of professional web developers to create powerful web solutions for their clients.

About This Library

Article sites are flooded with articles on Web Design and Search Engine Optimization (i.e. ways to get your site to show up high in the important search engines). Sometimes dozens of new articles are added every week. Most are not worth the effort it takes to read them. A few, however, are truly interesting and useful.

For this blog, the Cheap Web Hosting Report staff will post the best web design and search engine optimization articles we find on articles sites. We'll try our best to separate the small amount of meat from the piles of bone and gristle.